She regarded her domes. In other rooms there were other canvases that spoke of other decades. Her lifelike, almost photographic portraits of personalities from the end of the last regime and the beginning of the revolution now brought considerable sums in the art houses of Europe. I had gotten a taste of all that right here in Tehran and across the Gulf, where young Arab princes showed off who could bid higher for her newest works, the domes. It was a world so far from where I’d just come from that even now I felt I was coming apart at the seams. I had sat in auctions in Dubai and Sharjah and watched money move like a virus. Everybody was dirty and my assignment was to be present and write about the “quality” of the works of art. A lot of the people in those rooms who bid on the art would be in other rooms the next day sending money for one side or the other fighting in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen. And so it endured, the imposture. I’d get invited to dinners at restaurants on Sheikh Zayed Road where they brought lobster and sushi not on trays but in crates the size of golf carts. I was a part of it. A small cog in the pageant of Middle Eastern excess and injustice.

They, the billionaires, had made a racket out of the twilight of Miss Homa’s life. Yet the money she made for herself went to nursing homes, to orphanages, to hospitals, to teaching Afghan kids how to read and write, to war veterans, to families of martyrs. There was good in the world and she was it. Had I been a Tolstoy I would have put it down in a sprawling, all-encompassing book that took in the kitchen sink in this grand, fucked-up country and the countries around it. But I wasn’t a Tolstoy, rather just another scribbler—as my mother called me—trying to make ends meet.

“Did you know,” Miss Homa said, “I hired an accountant for exactly three weeks to help me give away all the money I’ve been making? I found out he was already stealing from me. Now I do all of it myself. It takes more of my time than the painting. I spend more time over ledgers and lawyers than anything. I told my studio assistants to go away and not come back. I don’t paint anymore. I am finished.”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say. I tried cautiously, “It’s life, Miss Homa.”

“An ugly life. But I’ve lived it a long time. I want to end it.”

“End it?”

“And you are going to help me.”

* * *

The latest grotesque shopping mall on Hafez Avenue was between Miss Homa’s place and my own. There were several new restaurants on its sixth floor. After that last bout of mock interrogation with H, I’d gone there on my barbecued-liver binge. Now it was kebab that I wanted in copious quantities. The favor Miss Homa had asked of me was beyond the pale, and I had no idea what to do with it.